The Man Who Saved the NEA

Businessman-poet Dana Gioia has steered the once-moribund arts agency in mostly mainstream directions—and it's thriving

by Nanette Byrnes

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Soon after Dana Gioia took over as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts three and a half years ago, he began a project that would encourage U.S. troops and their families to write about their wartime experiences. The idea was to try to capture, in a world of instant messages and phone calls, some permanent record of their lives.

It sounds innocuous enough. But the effort was, in fact, a big departure for the NEA. For one thing, Gioia had initiated the idea himself. Typically, the NEA reacts to grant proposals.

The project's audience—the military—was also one the NEA had never focused on before. And it was funded in partnership with Boeing (BA), a first as well. The essays and letters have now been published in a Random House anthology, Operation Homecoming. And the NEA is bringing in opera and musical theater companies to perform at 39 bases in the U.S. as well.

For Gioia's NEA, these are much more than a pair of successful programs. They are evidence that the Endowment, against all odds, is once again thriving.

Weird Art

Back in the mid-1990s, conservative members of Congress, particularly Newt Gingrich, intended to abolish the NEA. Painting the Endowment as a way of getting taxpayers to foot the bill of the avant-garde, they voiced outrage at examples of government-funded outre art, including the homoerotic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and a crucifix suspended in urine by Andres Serrano.

In the end, the Endowment survived, but it was battered and bruised. Its annual budget, as high as $176 million in 1992, had been cut back to $98 million. Congress limited the Endowment's scope, eliminating direct grants to most artists and requiring that 40% of its budget (after expenses) go to the states, to be divvied up by local arts groups.

So when Gioia (pronounced JOY-uh) arrived in Washington in February, 2003, it's not too surprising he was quickly advised to keep a low profile. He was well known in intellectual circles, but a Washington neophyte.

In those early months on the cocktail party circuit, invariably a "wise old man" would offer advice: Lay low. "You can't change the situation," Gioia remembers them counseling him. "The inside opinion was that the institution was impossibly mired in the past." Ambitious and highly visible programs like Operation Homecoming were exactly what Gioia was told not to undertake.

Politically Astute

But Gioia felt, in every bone of his body, that he should do the opposite of what he was being told. Raised by working-class parents in Hawthorne, Calif., Gioia, 55, is both an accomplished poet and a Stanford MBA who helped rejuvenate the Jell-O brand at General Foods before leaving to write full-time in 1992.

The marketer in him felt strongly that the NEA should make its presence felt, show its impact, sell its importance. Gioia believed he could best revive the agency by explicitly serving the voting taxpayer—not just the arts community—and he made an early, politically astute promise to fund at least one project in every congressional district. He launched a series of national initiatives that few could object to: the military programs, Shakespeare in American Communities, a national recitation contest called Poetry Out Loud, and a push in 120 communities called The Big Read.

Not everyone saw the opportunities. His own staff, for example, was "caught off guard" by the idea of mixing the military and the opera, says Wayne Brown, the NEA's director of music and opera.

Fewer Readers

Brown initially guessed half a dozen opera companies would be interested. Twenty-four signed up. Arts writers criticized the new focus as overly mainstream. A.O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times (NYT), has written that "once embattled," the NEA under Gioia is "now emasculated."